Episode 5 – Frank Viele

What's New England blues-rocker Frank Viele doing on ACOUSTIC Northeast? Give a listen and you'll see he transcends genre.

Frank's New England Music Awards include Album of the Year, Male Performer of the Year, Songwriter of the Year (twice) and Live Act of the Year.

Fondly listening to his grandmother play piano as a child and later reinvigorated as a teenager inspired by his older brother’s taste in music and an acoustic guitar he left behind when he moved to the West Coast, Viele developed a deep appreciation for a wide range of genres including rock, blues, folk, and country.

He began writing his own music as a teenager and quickly developed a knack for crafting deeply personal and emotive songs that spoke to the human experience.

After honing his craft fronting New York City based Jam/Funk/Rock Outfit “Frank Viele & The Manhattan Project,” Frank released his debut solo album “Fall Your Way” in 2015, which was met with critical acclaim.

He has released four solo albums since, including the recent "The Trouble With Desire," and a 2026 EP, "The Silo."

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:08

Hello and welcome to Acoustic Northeast, bringing you the singers, songwriters, and the scene of the vibrant acoustic music scene in the Northeast U.S. I am Dave Goldenberg.

SPEAKER_02 0:19

And I am George Malice, and welcome to the show. If you are interested, we would love to get your feedback, and you can reach us at acousticnortheast at gmail.com and you can listen to this podcast and our previous ones wherever you listen to your podcasts and also on YouTube at Acoustic Northeast.

SPEAKER_03 0:39

We want to give a shout out to our sponsors hear it there, bringing you information about live music events and lots of other content regarding live music in the Tri-State. Hudson Harding, folk music radio promoters, and WBXO Radio streaming um classic rock and all other kinds of cool stuff, including Acoustic Northeast, uh from Hopewell Junction, New York. Uh George, who do we have today?

SPEAKER_02 1:09

We have Frank Vielli. Frank Vielli is a Connecticut guy, and he's got a brand new EP out called The Silo, and you're gonna you're really gonna hear what Frank is gonna play today in studio. So here's Frank Vielli. Hi, everybody, and welcome to Acoustic Northeast. I am co-host George Malice, along with my buddy Dave Goldenberg. Hello. And we are here in the studios of WBXO in beautiful Hopewell Junction, New York. Our engineer is Hugh Curtin, and tonight we have the pleasure of turning you on to singer-songwriter Frank Vielli. Frank, welcome to the show, buddy. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, yeah, it's our pleasure. We would like you to kick off the show with a tune for everybody. If you could intro it, tell everybody what you're gonna play, and whatever you want to add.

SPEAKER_01 2:12

I just started re I started playing this one again live, and uh, it's an older one of mine um from uh not my most recent full-length album, but the EP before that. Uh it's called The Time is a Thief EP, and um this one's called The River.

unknown 2:29

Yeah, something like that.

SPEAKER_04 2:47

We're all going across the river.

SPEAKER_03 2:54

We're all going around You got it to what makes you shiver Before it time comes to an end up and shrink from a silver cup just keep looking up Be strong cause deep in the heart the river keeps going on we're all going across the river we're all going around there and if you down this we can sit once again Hold up the river will lead you home Hold up you never long Sail over It's what you got The care when birds have flown The river will eat you home You never alone Oh be strong Steeping the high The river keeps flowing on the river keeps Flowing on Nice That's Frank Vielli You're listening to Acoustic Connection beautiful song So Frank you you got a chord at the end there, man. I'm used to playing it on piano. I was like, oh yeah. So what what was your when where did you find out you were a songwriter? I know you had kind of an early start in music.

SPEAKER_01 6:03

Um yeah, my older brother, um, he's nine years older than me. He went to Cahi. Um he came back from college and then he moved to the West Coast and he left his my father's old guitar that he had had um home and I was 16 or 14. And I just picked it up. And uh, you know, it was one of those, you know, I think it all kind of happens at that phase of your life, you know, and all of a sudden you start to, you know, you you start to look at adulthood a little bit, things don't make a lot of sense to you. And we all find ways to um figure that out. And for me, it was playing that guitar and starting the right songs. The first ones were awful, but they were there.

SPEAKER_03 6:44

Of course. Now you probably remember some of those, and fortunately, we're not gonna ask you to play them. If anybody asked me to play the first song I ever wrote, it was just nothing but but youthful angst. Um but you you grew up in a a single with a single mom, right? And so I guess you're your that was your dad's guitar. Um how did that affect your songwriting and your relationship with music?

SPEAKER_01 7:07

Um I uh at this age now I can look back and see it did have a huge effect. Um the big thing for me was um in those kinds of relationships, um in those kinds of situations for a young man, you um you choose to take on a level of strength at times, which is probably not um easy for a young person. It's not. And um you find an escape, right? So when no one's looking, what is that escape? And for me, when no one was looking, it was music.

SPEAKER_03 7:40

It was my drugs would have been easier, come on.

SPEAKER_01 7:42

Yeah, it would've they would have, right? But for me it was music, and um, it was not just my music, I was actually a really big Dave Matthews fan. And so I used to, you know, traveling all the weekends to go see shows. And um before I graduated college, I'd seen him live 137 times.

SPEAKER_02 7:59

That's wild.

SPEAKER_01 8:00

I would I would play that game where you know I had a good buddy of mine named Mike, and he would tell his parents he was staying at my house, and I would tell my parents I was staying at his house, and we'd hop in his beat up van and drive to Ohio for two days Dave Matthews band. Um, and um a lot of what I learned on guitar happened in the parking lots of those concerts. Like there was a point in my life where like I didn't know what scales were, I didn't know what chords were, but I could play every Dave Matthews song ever written, uh, which was pretty cool, right? And um it it it started there. I think you know, for anybody, it's always starts with somebody.

SPEAKER_03 8:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:38

Um, and for me it was Dave Matthews.

SPEAKER_03 8:40

173 shows. He must have 137. 137. He must have recognized you at some point.

SPEAKER_01 8:45

It got it got to the point where we had enough. We had we had we had learned how to like stub ourselves down into the front row with like one expensive ticket on eBay and one cheap ticket in the parking lot. And we played all the games we had to play, and um, you know, there were all those blogs, and we were like known on the blogs, and my buddy had like 11 drumsticks, right? Like it was like that kind of thing. Yeah, looking back now, it was it was we were pretty cool for a bunch of 17-year-olds.

SPEAKER_03 9:10

I've always wanted to ask this of somebody who like followed a band in the way people used to follow the dead. What did you find there? It wasn't just the music, there was something that you connected with that kept you coming back.

SPEAKER_01 9:23

You know, I think that was when I learned that I wanted to be a musician because I wanted that feeling of what it felt like being at those shows. I wanted that to be an everyday part of my life. Um it was the world around me was crazy when I was a kid. But for the three to four hours I was there for the two hours of that concert, it's like everything else was muted. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, and so that's just where it became, and then you know, as I got older, it became my record collection. I have over 4,000 albums on vinyl, all alphabetized in my in my basement at this point. Wow, um, organized. And I yeah, I do this thing. I I didn't complete it in 2025 because life got on the way. But I usually I listen to 365 records every year on vinyl, cover to cover. And I make a playlist with my favorite song off each record, and it's on Spotify, so my fans follow them and stuff like that. But how could they find it? Um right on my website, Frankvielli.com. Um, or you can go to my Spotify, find me on Spotify, and it's all the playlists are there too. V V-I-E-L-E.

SPEAKER_02 10:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:38

And um it's a uh so you know, within three years, we'll see over a thousand different albums, right? And um, I just I really pride myself now at this point in constantly pushing myself as an artist, but also the reason I do it on vinyl is it kind of becomes you know, as close as I can to a live concert in regards to that, like escape, you know, set up that cool area, you know, and you know, the right lighting, the right turntable, the right needle, it's all intricate. And then you have an old old speakers I rewired and a um an old original sansui tube preamp that's like yeah, as close to as concert as you can get, but it's um I think that's what it was for me. I think it was just that that that thing where it's like life is hard. Things are distracting, things get frustrating. But if you can find something beautiful and healthy that uh can help you escape like that. And for me, it was music.

SPEAKER_03 11:44

I guess the cassette slash C D era.

SPEAKER_01 11:50

So I had an older cousin that was very, very big into hip hop, and he used to scratch records. He did a little bit with things like mixed master mic from the Beastie Boys and stuff, and I idolized him in my first instrument. Like I played piano when I was a kid with my grandmother, but my first like instrument that was mine before I played guitar, I used to scratch records. Whoa. Right. So I used to I used to mix with records, and I I had two turntables and a mixer in my in my little bedroom, and I had my headphones, and that be this was before my law got popular again. So uh even as a kid, like, and I was doing that starting in like the fourth grade. So um we owned a restaurant in West Haven, Connecticut, and my mother used to um there was an old record store down the street, we actually had to go to the restaurant to do like a morning payroll on Saturday mornings or whatever it was. She would give me a$5 bill and allow me to go through the 50 cent bin at the record store. She would drop me off. And so my first experiences of discovering people like Bob Dylan, you know, the BGs, everything you could imagine was coming out of that 10 cent, 50 cent bin at a record store, and then trying to find grooves, right? And I'll never forget it. I had a 12-inch, I was in the seventh, sixth grade, I had a uh a 12-inch single of the Rolling Stones, Miss You. Right? Came in that white sleeve with the lips on it and stuff, and I um I was scratching with it because it had that groove that right. Yeah, I kept listening to it and I was like, I want an electric guitar. That's that's how I landed my first electric guitar.

SPEAKER_02 13:33

That's cool. You talk you talk about so obviously you were self-taught guitar. Yeah. Um growing up, you listened to, I believe, your grandmother playing piano. And do you write on the piano now at all?

SPEAKER_01 13:47

A little bit, yeah. I now I when I write in the piano, it's because my guitar, uh, I'll be honest, as a writer, sometimes I can hide behind it because I can write a lot of riffs, I could do a lot of things like that. So it's easy to make a mediocre song sound pretty darn good when you can rip it up on guitar with it, right? Um, so when I find myself falling into like the same kind of um things, yeah, I'm not that great of a piano player. Like I I like I know I know my scales and I know my chords, but I can't like rip on the piano. Um so it forces me to be very conscious of what chords I'm playing and slow down, right? And that's you know, all of a sudden when I'm writing the piano, it's like, oh, that's when a that's when a minor seven chord comes in and stuff like that. That's when I start getting a little bit um that's when I start to find cooler changes. And then I eventually bring them back to the guitar, but the piano becomes a writing tool like that because it kind of handicaps me in that way.

SPEAKER_02 14:40

Yeah, I think I think writing on the guitar and writing on piano are like they're just two different planets almost. Yeah. Because um, it's just a different vibe or whatever. But I wanted to change subjects and talk about what you have coming out. Sure. Just tell us tell the audience uh what you have going on, and um it's a little bit of a departure for you, but but let everybody know what's going on.

SPEAKER_01 15:03

Absolutely. I um so my last record, Trouble with Desire, I'm very blessed. It it just won the award for New England's uh independent album of the year, and that record was such an incredible experience. I was my first trip down the Muscle Shoals, Alabama. I got to write and record with some legends down there, and um it was a real rocking record. It was I was I was in a mode that I felt was very acoustic, but um the uh the record just came out more rockin' because the band was killing.

SPEAKER_02 15:33

Oh yeah, we were Dave Dave and I were listening to the we've been listening to it, but on the way up to the studio today we were we were listening to it, and you know, Dave said this just reminds him of just this flat out rockin' album like from the 70s. You know, it's it's basic. There's no, you know, there there's there's guitars, there's screaming guitars, there's bass, there's drums, and you know, that's it straight out rock album. Was that what you were shooting for at the time? You said you were you. So I recorded 10 songs.

SPEAKER_01 16:04

The first time I went down, I recorded 10 songs. And then um I liked the record a lot, but it felt a little disconnected. And Muscle Shoals was such a different recording experience than anything I had done in Connecticut where I lived. Connecticut recording took a long time and it was pretty laborious, right? Like, let's spend some time finding our guitar tones, let's let's see what works, see what doesn't. And Muscle Shoals, I walked in, they already knew what mic I was gonna use for my guitar, what mic I was using for my vocals. I was working in the Nut House with Jimmy Nutt and those guys, and they they knew me before I walked in. And it was it was amazing because it was one of those things where it was like doors open and you know, we we hit record at 10 a.m. We stop at 5 15, we stop at noon every day for lunch, right? It was it was it was like going to work, yeah, right? And it was one of those things if you show up at 10.01, you might as well turn around and go home, right? Like that kind of deal. Um, and it was an amazing experience, and it just flew. And in six days, I had 10 tracks done stem to stern every vocal, every guitar, and it was the best I'd ever heard me sound like wow, these guys know what they're doing, right? It was just a different vibe. I had two producers, and I loved what we got, but it was also my first time working like that. So I came back and there was like the record feels disjointed. Um, and I was also just so inspired by the experience. Within a month, I had written 17 more tunes. And I called my producer, I was like, this record's great, it's the best thing I've ever done, but I think it can be better. And I sent him 17 demos, and he called me and he said, Yeah, we gotta record these some of these tunes. So I brought my band back down to Muscle Shoals five months later, and we recorded another 11 tunes. And the thing was, is we looked before I recorded those 11 that I chose, we looked at the power that was on the first record, the stuff that we and we we asked ourselves what were the best songs on the first 10 that we recorded. And they were the more rockin' stuff, they were trouble with desire, they were hearts we left behind, right? So then it was like, What do we choose? We wanted to round it out. I had written the song for my mother that was part of that second version uh clause, which was a little more emotive. Um, but then also I we I wrote some more bangers, like I wrote Lo-Fi Goodbye, I wrote Putting Out Fires that were really rocking to round out that record. And it became the rock record because after the first trip, those songs that we I really felt were game changers for me, and that that just were ten out of ten in regards to how they came out, how I performed them, but also they were just they were just uh the most authentic thing that I was doing.

SPEAKER_03 18:58

You're a little less bluesy, it felt, and a little more rock straight ahead, which exactly. Um, how would you describe your sound or the type of music you play?

SPEAKER_01 19:07

Um I could spend an hour talking about it, but I've learned um that I'm a Heartland rock artist. A heartland rock. I've got enough from the industry side now to say like you're heartland rock. It's uh it's a niche genre. Um, but it's you know, it's it's rock and roll with you know kind of your heart on your sleeve kind of words, very passionate lyrical content. Um and there's a little bit of soul in it and a little bit of twang. Um so those blues elements kind of come into it. So it's Americana tinged, it's folk tinged, it's blues tinged, it's soul tinged, it's even country tinged, because again, it was done down on Muscle Shoals, Alabama.

SPEAKER_03 19:49

In another direction, it could go country, it feels like either.

SPEAKER_01 19:52

It could. It could if if if the vocal wasn't as aggressive as it is. I still I can't get rid of the I can't get rid of the sandpaper behind my vocal cords. I've tried.

SPEAKER_03 20:00

It's a great sound, and it's great to know that you talk like this and you don't just sing like this, because I always wonder about that.

SPEAKER_01 20:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 20:06

Well, that brings us back to you know what you have, what you're gonna be releasing in February. Sorry, we don't have to tangent there, which is you know, which is your Heartland Rock album, which is a cover album. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

SPEAKER_01 20:19

So the last record was Heartland Rock Record. This record coming out um has one cover on it, my first time every year.

SPEAKER_02 20:25

My my apologies. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 20:26

But it's got four originals. It's a five-track EP. Okay. It's called the Silo EP. I know that's confusing, no need to apologize. I I write I write with so many other artists and I work on so many projects regularly as a writer, so it's always hard what's going on. But um my dear friend Lee Duise, um uh who I played over a hundred concerts with opening across the country, he's a season nine American Idol winner. He's an incredible um Americana singer-songwriter, um, just unbelievable. And um, you know, when you drop when you travel the country with somebody like that um in the car for so long, you know, you you start to be influenced by them and then you start to talk about hey, and he said, Man, I would love to record some of your stuff sometime. And then he had a couple free days in Michigan with his producer and he called me, he's like, You want to come down? And I had a bunch of songs that were I'd say three quarters written uh on my cell phone um from you know a couple days off on the my previous tour, sitting in a motel room in Portland, Oregon. And you know, they weren't the happiest tunes there were, but there was something very emotive and and very honest and raw about them. And um I finished your mom my drive to Michigan. Cool. And we recorded them there, and then this EP's been waiting to come out, so I finally get to release it. You want to give us one of those? I've never played them live, so we'll give it a shot. Here we here we go.

SPEAKER_00 21:47

I mean, not not like I didn't miss a court in the last one, too. You know, it's funny because I I haven't been I haven't been playing live for the last about 40 days because I've been working on the release of the record and all these other things, so it's like it's exciting, but it's also like getting cobwebs out. This is actually, I think we'll do the title track.

SPEAKER_02 22:07

The silo.

unknown 22:08

Yeah, the silo.

SPEAKER_02 22:09

Frank Velly, everybody.

SPEAKER_04 22:44

How to say what's a two? Where will they? Break these chains. Speak your truth. Give me words. Show me proof. Sallow stands. Concrete walls. All alone. Strong in soul. Where's it been? Where's it room? Lonely hearts run from true. And I can't tell how you feel. And I can't sleep fearing it's real. Why must you disconnect hearts? Distance can't divide true counterparts. Loving you. Wasted sears loving you. Wasted words. Loving you.

SPEAKER_03 25:15

Sweet. That's great. Beautiful. That's Silo by Frank Viel. Title Track of Your New EP out when?

SPEAKER_01 25:22

Uh February 20th.

SPEAKER_03 25:23

February 20th. And where can people find it when it's released?

SPEAKER_01 25:26

Every digital music platform. And if you go to my website now, you can purchase the um limited edition uh pre-order on vinyl. Really excited about that. I'm a vinyl nerd, so we just spoke about. So 180 grams, only 250 of them pressed, already close to half sold out. And um what I do for everybody is if you pre-order the vinyl, um, you get the entire album a month early digitally. So you get an email within 48 hours on the whole record. So before it comes out February 23th.

SPEAKER_03 25:56

And the website is frankvieli.com. Yep. Frank V-I-E-L E.com. Great. So one thing I noticed going through your site, I came across um an article about you and I decided to test my Spanish and reading it. And it turns out you are a big hit in Argentina and Brazil. How did that happen?

SPEAKER_01 26:17

You know, this is gonna be a music business conversation now, right? I do it on a record label and I'm just gonna shoot straight. Um I got a lot of lot of fellow musicians who I love dearly that think the internet's a terrible thing. And they think Spotify is a terrible thing, and they think social media is terrible. Does it change everything? Oh, absolutely. But it also gives you the opportunity to find your trap. And I told you earlier that I'm a Heartland rock artist. Apparently, Heartland Rock is the biggest genre in South America. One of the biggest genres. They love American music, they love rock and roll, and they just found me online.

SPEAKER_02 27:02

That's funny, that's fantastic.

SPEAKER_01 27:04

The next thing I knew, there were like Brazilian weightlifters putting the trouble with desire behind their weightlifting videos, and they got one fifty thousand subscribers. My YouTube is over 72,000. Half of it is Brazil and South America. I mean, I got a whole bunch of music videos that we released. Uh, it's a five-part series of me and um uh another whole woman character um done up as original uh Nintendo 8-bit characters. And it's a five-part level thing, a whole music video. That was that happened because um the gentleman became a huge fan of mine in Mexico and reached out to me to tell me about how much one of my songs meant to him and his wife and and and their relationship. And um I looked at his page and I saw what he did on his page, and he said, I'd love to make you a Nintendo character.

SPEAKER_03 27:54

I was like, can I pay you to make me a music series? That's how the that's how the Nintendo videos on your site came together. They're really fun to watch. Thank you. I can get a chance. Check out his site and and go to the music video page and see some really cool, sort of old 8-bit style Nintendo videos featuring Frank Bielli. That's that's wild.

SPEAKER_01 28:16

I'll be real with you at first, I was getting all these messages. And um they weren't in English. So they were coming through on Instagram and YouTube messenger and email, and I was like, I mean, maybe someone's trying to steal my credit card number. I don't know what's going on, right? Um but then I just one day, just because I I shame on me, I just ignored them and never thought to me that like these are like fans of mine. I was in the back of a tour band once and I translated, I used Google Translators and said, What are these people trying to say to me? And it was mountains of messages from from like real fans. I found out the song I wrote for my mom trying to raise a man had been translated into four languages on YouTube. And I I was able to I had all these messages from people that used it as a part of their wedding in the Philippines or in South America, and it was like, wow. And you know, and if you read all the stories, I mean some of my favorite artists found their first group of fans outside the United States before they found before they found them close to their home. So for me, yeah, it shows shows the power of music. Yeah. And um shows shows what the new industry can be. You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_02 29:28

You know, someone said to me a while ago, they said, I I asked them a question, I said, how do you get your music heard? And they said to me, just write a good song. You write a good song and it'll get heard. And obviously, here's a situation where you wrote a great song and translate it into four languages. That's that's how you do it. No, no, I realize that, but but it's but it just goes to show you you write a good song and you know it gets out there.

SPEAKER_01 29:57

It's a different industry now, and and I can see that. But the one thread, right? Because even the phrase good song, um, you know, there there's um there's variables of that, right? It's an opinion in so many ways. Um what I've found to be the thread um and the artists that I love most, and I think it's part of social media connecting us to artists on a different level than they used to. The the the the secret weapon is authenticity. The secret weapon is being real. Tell your stories, tell stories that you understand. And um that's been the um for me, this last this last record and EV right and EV coming out. That's the um that's the thing, is I I I do feel like I'm writing more as myself than writing to write a song, if that makes sense. Um I think that comes from growth and uh working with some great writers the last couple years that that that taught me how to take the things that were coming out of me and make them connect on a different space.

SPEAKER_02 31:05

Cool. Well, Frank, I want to thank you for coming on the show. This has been great to to hear your music and to find out you know your past and what makes you tick. And I'd like to ask you to take us out with uh with a song. What's your choice to do here?

SPEAKER_01 31:21

I'm gonna do track one off the last record. Um the album's course is The Trouble with Desire. The track is Hearts Me Left Behind. Um, and this is this is my favorite track on the record. Uh well, second favorite tomorrow for my mom, but it's a little more rocking. And um, I um, you know, this song is is just kind of about that that thing where it's like when I found out I was a heartland rock artist. If you listen to that genre, it's a lot, there's a lot of songs about meeting your true love when you're 17 and eventually living happily ever after. There was no songs about making a ton of mistakes along the way and then finally finding the right person that makes sense in like your mid-40s, right? And I wanted to write that song, and uh, that's what this one is. It's called Hearts to be Left Behind. Here it is.

SPEAKER_04 32:47

She left me in the hotel room, feeling all but every day Lost and gone along without a blue funny how times like that and days like this It's opened up my eyes to live in your kids ghost live in the shadows my pedals to the flow flying heart C do we want a more let's not start with love or take a moment strike Burning bridges over the heart we left behind, relaxed as a silence to the storm running headlong right it's to the wind to Mr. Free I could take the wheelball Could never change us to the ground again It's ever morning I'm with you feels like heaven's bliss It's opened up my eyes to the lovely kiss living shadows up to the floor flying off the more Let's all stand with love take a moment of few Let's see the side and it's the buttons gonna fly to live in the shadows to float and float Let's give it a bridge is over hearts we left on the bridge is over the heart we left the bridge is over the hearts on the bridges over the hearts, on the bridges over the hearts we left behind that.